Biography: Robert Dessaix was a precocious 12-year-old in mid-1950s Australia when the first Sputnik was crisscrossing the heavens.
Inspired by this he acquired a Russian dictionary, and so began his love affair with Russia's language and literature. In the 1960s he was an undergraduate in Moscow, and in the 1970s he was a postgraduate and read every word by and about Turgenev on which he could lay his hands.
By his own admission the young Dessaix was a prig. He couldn't understand why the successful Turgenev endlessly complained about his unhappiness and his looming death. Now in middle age, Dessaix has returned to Turgenev a wiser man. The product of that re-encounter is this book.
Ivan Turgenev was born in Russia in 1818. His mother was a serf-owning tyrant who strove to crush her son. Happily, for literature as well as himself, Turgenev grew into a sensitive and progressive if slightly foppish young man. In his 20s he began to write and at the age of 30 he published his first book, A Hunter's Notes (1848). This work, with its tenderhearted portraits of the peasantry, apparently inspired the czar to free Russia's serfs. Half a dozen great novels followed that were notable not so much for the elegance of the plots as for the forensic depiction of the characters' emotional states. By the time of his death in 1883, Turgenev was a fixture in the Russian literary pantheon, along with Gogol, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky.
Turgenev's private life, as well as looking less conventional than his public one, was regarded by his contemporaries (and probably even by himself) as less successful. When he was 22, Turgenev fell in love with Pauline Viardot, a singer and the wife of the scholar, Louis Viardot. Though we don't know enough about him, Monsieur Viardot must have been a remarkable man because for the next 40 years, wherever he and Pauline were, Turgenev was usually nearby and, if he wasn't, he was always in close touch by letter, with both of them. In Courtavenel, where the Viardots had a castle, he lodged with the family for three years. In Paris, he took the flat above theirs. In Baden-Baden, he built a chalet behind the Viardot villa. In Bougival, the Impressionist colony outside Paris, Turgenev built a house beside the Viardots'. Despite so much proximity, however, it is doubtful the relationship between Pauline and Turgenev was ever consummated.
Subtitled Travels with Turgenev, this book describes Dessaix's visits to the places where the Russian and the Viardots lived. A lesser writer would have opted to visit them in the order in which they appear in his subject's biographies but Dessaix does not. He starts in Baden-Baden where Turgenev lived in middle age. Then he moves to Paris, where the writer and the Viardots fled during the Franco-Prussian war. Then he loops back to Courtavenel, where the ménage à trois first flourished. Then he darts forward to Bougival, where it finished, literally, when Turgenev died in Pauline's arms. Finally he goes to Spasskoye, Turgenev's Russian estate, where he wrote the bulk of his work when away from Pauline.
This non-chronological approach, as well as being closer to the experience of how we know people in life, makes the story much more interesting to follow than if the narrative had been linear. That alone would have made this book worth recommending, but the pleasure of Dessaix's storytelling is amplified by the further elements he adds. These include some sharp pieces of travel writing (he's very good on Moscow in the 1960s and now), some frank accounts of his own complicated autobiography and some waspish strictures on the stupidity of modern life. And finally, threaded through it all, there is Dessaix's thesis regarding love.
Turgenev, he argues, believed real love was the only way open to a non- believer to defeat mortality. If you really loved you could see through the wall of time and glimpse something eternal: that's what Turgenev thought at any rate. In modern life, on the other hand, we no longer love in the way Turgenev advocated. This is because for us love is either just carnal or part of the happiness package to which we all believe we have an inalienable right. As far as loving is concerned, Dessaix would have us believe, and I think with some justice, that our ancestors ordered these matters better than we do.
It requires extraordinary dexterity on the author's part to weave these various elements into a cohesive and lovely whole. But Dessaix's technique is deft and never once did I feel my attention faltering. This ability to maintain attention continuously is a rare achievement and though I had never heard of Robert Dessaix until I opened Twilight of Love, now that I have, I intend to read more of him.
Carlo Gébler is a writer. His book, The Siege of Derry, a piece of straight narrative history, and The Bull Raid, a new version of the Táin for adults and children, will be published this year
Twilight of Love: Travels with Turgenev, By Robert Dessaix, Scribner, 269pp. £12.99